Domain: EdTech, Volunteer Management
Stage: Validation
When: March 2024 – January 2025
Team Skill Set: CEO with managerial and operational experience as a former military commander; COO, the idea originator, is a networking specialist and highly regarded connector.
Thesis
The idea emerged from personal frustration during the recent conflict. While volunteers were the driving force of our society and the backbone of the country, finding and managing opportunities became much harder than it should have been.
The volunteering ecosystem is chaotic: unstructured, fragmented, and incredibly hard to navigate. Administrators struggle to manage shifts and track hours, often relying on messy Excel sheets.
Our vision was to make volunteering easy and engaging, for both organizations and individuals.
For administrators: a centralized portal to organize volunteers, manage supply and demand, schedule shifts, and track hours.
For volunteers: an intuitive app to find nearby opportunities, enhanced with gamification elements to make volunteering more rewarding.
After initial ideation and discovery, we decided to focus on high schools, where students are required to complete weekly volunteer hours as part of the informal education system.
Validation
We began our journey with conversations, lots of them. In the first two months, we spoke with three mayors, two deputy mayors, five heads of volunteering departments, five school coordinators, and six nonprofits. The feedback confirmed the pain: everyone agreed that the system was broken.
We soon discovered an existing Ministry of Education-funded app used by schools to track one of the largest volunteer programs in the country. The problem wasn’t the absence of a tool. One mayor even told us, “I’d rather work with pen and paper.”
Encouraged by this, I taught myself Figma and designed a UX/UI mockup that integrated gamification for students and an organized management portal for staff. The mockups excited our potential users, who loved that it wasn’t as clunky or generic as what they were used to.
We spoke with two angel investors, but the discussions quickly stalled. They asked for detailed data, which was understandable, yet we simply didn’t have it at that point.
One of the most important realizations we had early on was that the budget for what we wanted to solve in high schools fell under informal education, a category with far less funding than formal education. The budgets come from the Ministry of Education, which already pays for the existing platform used by all high schools in Israel.
We eventually understood that this payment structure made the Ministry the ultimate buyer, a discovery that later became central to our business model’s failure. The Ministry also imposed strict requirements for new vendors, such as at least three years of operation and over ten million shekels in annual revenue.
We tried to adapt our solution to fit within the formal education framework, where budgets are larger, but it was already too late. Once we realized there simply wasn’t enough money in this space, we decided to shut down the project.
Why it didn’t progress
- The Fatal Buyer Problem: We eventually realized that volunteering falls under informal education, a sector with almost no budget. Even though municipalities loved the concept, their offers were nowhere near what we needed to make the product sustainable.
- Regulatory and Bureaucratic Barriers: When we finally reached out to the Ministry of Education, we learned they only work with vendors that have operated for at least three years and generate over ten million shekels in annual revenue. For a volunteering app, that was absurd, and an immediate dead end.
- Weak Differentiation: Since the Ministry already pays for an existing solution, it would have been almost impossible to compete without a truly unique differentiator. Even after extensive brainstorming, we couldn’t find a feature strong enough to convince schools to leave a free, albeit deeply flawed, system.
- Funding and Motivation Decline: The combination of a small, regulation-heavy local market and high development costs killed our momentum. We didn’t approach VCs, and the few angels we spoke with needed data we couldn’t yet provide. Without a viable business model, we decided to stop.
Insights
- Start with the Buyer: Our biggest mistake was reaching the real buyer too late. Enthusiasm from users means little if the buyer can’t or won’t pay. Understanding who controls the budget, and how much of it actually exists, is crucial.
- Validate Authentically: I learned to stop steering conversations toward the answers I wanted to hear. Instead, I began asking open-ended questions like, “What do you think about the app you’re currently using?” That shift revealed genuine pain points rather than polite agreement that leads nowhere.
- Avoid Heavy Bureaucratic Spaces: Next time, I’ll avoid sectors that require endless approvals, permissions, and infrastructure. It’s better to start small with something you can test quickly and independently.
- Embrace the Learning Curve: Although the project didn’t move forward, it turned out to be an invaluable learning experience. It taught me how to validate ideas quickly and deeply, navigate complex systems, and stay grounded when excitement meets reality.
